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This is a half-truth, because there isn't really an AP Computer Science anymore. From wikipedia: "Due to low numbers of students taking the exam, AP Computer S

• iopuy 8y ago
  Wow, that sounds like a failure of teaching to me. The exam switched from C++ to Java in roughly 2004 and then it is discontinued in 2009? Perhaps a change to the teaching methods could have been implemented before cancellation. Although I took the case via distance learning and I'm not sure that would have had any effect for someone like me.
  • chrisabrams 8y ago
    I was a part of the first class that changed the AP test from C++ to Java. Our CS teacher had state winning teams for C++ and none of us passed the Java test :/ The communication and process for switching the test was handled poorly to say the least. It was pretty hard spending years looking forward to high school CS to learn C++ and then be denied that. To this day I’ve used Java for absolutely nothing but I do plenty of native compilation for JS/Python -> C/C++.
• godzillabrennus 8y ago
  Makes sense why more people are enrolled if they lowered the complexity but basically kept the name.
  • mbrumlow 8y ago
    I don't know who is behind this sort of thing but I watched it happens to IT growing up. System administration and working with the low levels of operation systems (not programming so much, things like bash, cmd, and all the low level stuff you can do before you get to programming) was something that actually took some skill. If I recall a of our operating systems came out of people who were more classified as system administrators. Anyways my local school offered a associates in Unix Operating systems. The teacher was amazing, probably one of the best I had, but his class got canned for some shitty windows bullshit because the students complained so much about it being to hard. Yeah the class had rigor, but the problem really was 2 fold. Students did not want to really learn the stuff and mostly lacked a good foundation in computers at all. So they struggled on simple things like pipes and redirects. I also remember they were pushing IT related classes very hard. You could not go anywhere on campus without some poster saying how much money you would make if you got a career in IT information systems! MIS stuff was also big too. Fast forward, we flooded the market with IT people who had no passion, and simply where not really qualified to do the job at hand. Now IT is mostly a high paying job where it some how is acceptable to hire a contractor to do all the work for you. And when something goes wrong, it was the contractors fault. Anyways now that I have been writing software for over 10 years and I see what candidates are capable of doing when giving them simple test on interviews (no not that white board non-since, mostly "hello world" in whatever language they want). I am fairly sure that the vast majority of the candidates would have not passed the C or C++ classes taught in my high school, or the ones in the local collage. Schools are so fucked. Low turn out, low grades, and low number of people passing results in LOWERING the bar. Get ready everybody for a fun wonder time where nobody knows how to do anything and it is always somebodies else's fault why they could not get the work done! The number one thing I get from peers when they fail to get the work done over the years has been 'well I have had no training on this', and 'nobody showed me how to do it', when showing them how to do it would basically mean doing it... And no this was not a once time event, things like every task would require you to "show them how to do it", result in meetings to talk about solutions. Opps, turned into a rant. Anyways I am glad I missed the big switch over to java, not knowing C/C++ would have killed any chance of me getting where I have got.
    • cellularmitosis 8y ago
      I had a similar experience, having been in college during the first dot-com boom and bust. During the boom years it seemed that everyone was pushing their sons and daughters into computer science (the department experienced record enrollment for a few short years), yet I would overhear things in the hallway like "Take Prof. Smith for CS305, he doesn't make you code!". In one of my "Intro to Programming" courses, class attendance had dwindled from 80ish to about a dozen students after just a few weeks. However, all 80 showed up to the final review. The questions they were asking made it clear they could not have possibly completed anything past the second assignment. It was a very surreal few years.
• Ancalagon 8y ago
  I bet the issue is not necessarily a lack of interest, more likely a lack of exposure. There arent many (successful) programmers willing to work on a teacher's salary when they can probably make 3 or 4 times that elsewhere in industry. I didnt even have the option to take AP computer science in high school, I imagine thats due to the lack of teachers, and that situation is probably pretty similar around the country
  • HarryHirsch 8y ago
    Back then at my school the state offered CS training for mathematics teachers who wanted to broaden their horizon. They were supposed to pass their knowledge on to other teachers who were interested. This worked well, but it helps if your teachers aren't all low-achievers.
• woodruffw 8y ago
  I look the Computer Science AP in 2013, and I'd say it involved more than light familiarity with Java: I had to write algorithms, do asymptotic analysis on my algorithms, and fix logic bugs in code samples. There were some rote memorization parts too (what does this Java class do? Is Java pass-by-value or by reference?), but I'd say that the class earned its "Computer Science" title. I skipped the introductory CS course at my university, but the impression that I got from my friends that took it was that it was roughly as rigorous and technical as my AP experience was. On the other hand, I know nothing about AP CS Principles.
  • humanrebar 8y ago
    > Is Java pass-by-value or by reference? So they have trick questions on the test? A. Pass by value B. Pass by reference C. <correct answer> Well, the thing is...
    • woodruffw 8y ago
      I think they excused it as "pass by value, but some of the values are references." It was a bad question.
• vincentriemer 8y ago
  I took AP Computer Science A in 2010 and while I'd agree that it was hardly a thorough curriculum, it did give me the knowledge to successfully skip Comp Sci 1 in college. My case was slightly unique though in that we had probably the best comp sci teacher you could expect in high school. He got through the entire A curriculum in half the time and spent the rest exploring more advanced topics/projects we were individually interested in.
• cmiles74 8y ago
  I believe any familiarity with any programming language will provide a student with a step-up when they leave the high-school environment and enter college. While I am not excited about AP classes lowering standards, the Wikipedia entry makes it clear that it was discontinued because so few students were taking the exam. After reading the article, it appears that most of these organizations working with high school educators and their students arrived on the seen much more recently: Code.org started working with the College Board in 2015. What they are doing appears to be working: the number of students both taking and passing the test has risen. This strikes me as unequivocally positive. In my experience, Java is not the friendliest environment. For someone with zero development background, I can easily imagine that the IDE and tools themselves are intimidating, let alone the language with all it's jargon and (in many cases) self-aggrandizing techno-speak. Perhaps the success of these programs will get more development classes into high school, but I think that even this level of success is significant.
• surbas 8y ago
  I am not sure why you are saying this is a "half-truth." AP classes always had a half-year courses (A) vs a year long study (AB.) The Comp Sci A test has been taught for 20+ years, and looking at the cirrocumuli looks like a punch list of today's typical junior dev interview, and looks equivalent to the real first class (not survey) in any com sci program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Computer_Science_A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Computer_Science_A
  • nv-vn 8y ago
    In my experience that was not accurate at all to the real class. In reality, we didn't cover about 50% of that at all (since it doesn't appear on the test). Instead, it was all arrays and for loops then 3-4 questions about how inheritance works and the free response questions that are graded based on like 3 specific details that could appear in a solution rather than correctness. This article seems like an advertisement for the class because it doesn't reflect the actual content or exam at all.
• zZorgz 8y ago
  The A version has been around as long as the AB version. For those unfamiliar, A is roughly equivalent to 1 college semester and AB was roughly equivalent to 2 college semesters, just like AP courses for other subjects. I was a developer in various imperative/OO languages already before I took the AB course, and I still found it to be challenging. I think for many that have never done any programming or CS, the A version course may still be decent. It does fall short under Big O, but there should also be some extra buffer time to do something else in the year outside the AP material. That depends on the quality of the instructor though.
  • burfog 8y ago
    It's not like that for the other subjects. Chemistry has just "Chemistry", good for two college semesters. Physics has four classes! There isn't an "A" or "B" or "AB", but there is a "C"! You can choose "Physics C Mechanics" and "Physics C Electricity and Magnetism", each worth a college semester. (you can do both) Alternately you can choose "Physics 1" and "Physics 2", which are each worth a semester for non-science non-engineering majors. Economics has both "Macroeconomics" and "Microeconomics". It's not "A" and "AB", nor is it "A" and "B".
    • zZorgz 8y ago
      Fair. I was thinking of Calculus which was similar though and had AB and BC? It’s been a while. Physics C has two distinctive parts as you noted.
• b_tterc_p 8y ago
  My school did not offer the course, but I was allowed to take some basic computer related course and just self teach myself the curriculum in the corner of the room and take the test on my own in 2012. I have never formally studied computer science but I think it was a reasonable curriculum. It was all java based. It primarily emphasized the basic concepts of OOP, testing if you can work with a basic API, and designing some recursive algorithms to solve a problem. I took 11 other APs, and felt it was comparably deep relative to the other tests. Generally I thought the AP classes were very effective as mature 101 introductions to the subject matter. Computer Science has a rough time because many students may reasonably be well beyond its expectations before even starting the course unlike one may expect for, say, Chemistry or Calculus. But I thought it was great for those who didn't already have the background.
• jmull 8y ago
  The article is mainly about participation for last year vs. this year. What happened in 2009 isn't that relevant.
• nv-vn 8y ago
  I wish I could double upvote this. There is pretty much nothing redeemable about these two courses and they have absolutely nothing to do with CS.